My brother’s been working on this Disney piano medley over the past week or so. Today, it premiered on a Facebook Live concert hosted by our town. It was nice to see so many familiar faces performing from the comfort of their own homes, but I hope “virtual live music” won’t end up being the norm in the long term – that would be very sad. Anyway, here’s the full video of the medley. Enjoy!
Adding a Flexbox Gallery to a Hugo Site
Last night before bed, I was thinking about how to add a photo gallery to my Hugo site. At first, I thought about pulling in images from Instagram at build time, but quickly decided against that. Currently, Hugo builds this site in under 8 seconds, so adding functions to request images from Instagram would probably slow down the site build significantly.
Convincing My Wife to Switch to Hugo
My wife started her blog earlier this year, and she’s been taking it really seriously lately. Some days, she’s up until 11:30 at night working on her blog even after watching J all day. She only started a few months ago, and she’s already making money from affiliate programs. I’m very proud of her because I didn’t make a single cent on this blog until eight months in.
Anyway, I’ve been acting as her SEO instructor and quasi-developer. The main issue is I’m a WordPress power user, but not really a WordPress developer. I suppose I could learn PHP and read the WordPres codex before bed every night, but that doesn’t really strike me as a good use of time.
She’s been asking me to add more and more custom functionality to her blog over the past few weeks. At first, we were able to use plugins as a bandaid solution. The latest project has been adding a custom affiliate product module. The one she’s using now is quite buggy and kills page speed, so we were looking for a more lightweight solution that would integrate well with a few of the Japanese affiliate programs she’s using.
After some back and forth, I realized what she wanted would require some custom work. We’re trying to save up for a house now, so we didn’t want to spend money to hire someone. We talked through a few options, and settled on her switching to Hugo – the static site generator I use for this blog.
At first, she was afraid using a static site generator like Hugo would be too technical for her. After half an hour of me showing her my workflow, custom quick actions, and a few other hacks, she was much more comfortable. We eventually figured out what struck her as “super technical” – the monospaced font in Sublime Text. After I told her she could use any text editor with her choice of font, she warmed up to the idea pretty quickly.
Now I’m working on the design of her new static site. So far, I’ve got the basic HTML structure down, and I’ve built the affiliate product module she wanted.
I guess my wife is my first client when it comes to building static sites.
Let’s see how it goes!
Tennis and the Simple Things in Life
I’m not sure if I’m the only one who feels this way, but the COVID-19 pandemic has encouraged me to do some serious thinking about what I value in life.
In a way, it’s hit the “reset button” on my day to day conscious thinking. Specifically, I now have a deep apprecation for things that used to be mundane.
Yesterday, the local tennis courts in town finally opened up again. I used to play tennis almost everyday in high school, but nowadays I’m pretty bad. Regardless, I still enjoy playing tennis with my brother because it’s a really fun sport.
I couldn’t tell you how I felt after I heard the tennis courts were open again. It was pure unfiltered happiness – probably something I haven’t felt since I got my first pack of Pokémon cards as a kid.
The COVID-19 pandemic has undoubtedly been a terrible thing for the world, but I hope we will all emerge from this with a renewed sense of appreciation for the simple things in life and the things that really matter.
How to Enable CORS for a Google Cloud Function Using HTTP Invocation
A few days ago, I was experimenting with using Google Cloud Funtions to interact with the ICON blockchain. The function was set up to respond to an HTTP trigger, and it worked fine when accessed directly from a web browser. However, when I tried to access the function URL with Vue, the browser console reported a number of CORS-related errors. After some digging around and testing, I was able to resolve the issue. In this post, I’ll show you how I enabled CORS for a Google Cloud Function using the Python 3.7 runtime.
The 5 Most Popular Static Site Generators in 2020
Static Site Generators (SSGs) are a new emerging trend in the web-development world. For many decades, developing, publishing and editing content on a website required HTML skills. This made publishing a website beyond the capabilities of the average user.
How to Use Serverless Functions to Interact with the ICON Blockchain
Recently, I’ve been spending a lot of my limited free time trying to learn more about how to build blockchain applications on the ICON network. I don’t ever see myself being a full-blown developer, but I hope to gain enough knowledge and skills to be able to work with developers to build dApps on ICON.
How to Automatically Clear Cloudflare Cache After Deploying a Netlify Site
In this tutorial, you’ll learn how to set up a serverless function on Google Cloud Functions to automatically clear the Cloudflare cache after a successful deployment of your static site on Netlify.
An Evening Walk
It was really nice out this evening, so Ayaka and I went on a short walk after dinner. I don’t remember the last time we went out walking alone at night, but it was probably back in Japan last year.
Live Webinar – Host a Zoom Concert with MainStage
A few weeks ago, I published a post on how to host a Zoom concert with MainStage. Since then, the post has gotten thousands of views, and I’ve received dozens of questions about the setup process.
If you missed the webinar on June 6, 2020, feel free to check out the recorded video here. Also, be sure to subscribe to my mailing list if you want to be notified about future webinars!